Twitter Ecology

Being an indie author is a challenge. Because of the distractions, for one thing.

Distractions such as succumbing to the temptation to check sales reports six times an hour, or trying to figure out social media. Even, occasionally, performing real work to pay the bills.

My DOM – Distraction of the Moment – is Twitter ‘De-tweeting’. That is, undoing a previous Retweet that I Tweeted for the sole purpose of Retweeting the Tweet.

If you’ve reread the above sentence twice now and still don’t get it, don’t worry. You’re probably just not a true Twitter aficionado, which must, in the celestial scorebook, count in your favor. If, on the other hand, you’re rolling on the floor laughing, you probably tweet too much.

Basically, it says that I spend too much time on Twitter re-tweeting messages to help out friends or return favors.

In the course of this I have discovered a peculiar hitch in Twitter itself. If I attempt to Retweet a Tweet which sometime in the past I had already Retweeted, I get the message: ‘Undo Retweet?” The first time I encountered such a thing, I wondered if Twitter had gone bye-bye. In all honesty, I’m still not sure it hasn’t.

I mean, seriously, how can you “Detweet”? Aren’t there several important people out in the ether right now wishing they could indeed “Detweet”? And what happens to the human behind the original Tweet? Does he or she get a nasty message? “You were just Detweeted and now have no Klout!”

It took me 3 days to get up my nerve. The upshot, however, was that after Detweeting I was free to Retweet.

My father, I should probably mention, was a physicist. One of the things I picked up from my childhood was scientific theory, so naturally I decided to experiment. Opening a second window with my Twitter timeline, I carefully retweeted, and observed the Retweet pop up in the Tweet stream. I then Detweeted.

Unbelievably, the Retweet actually disappeared. Ipso Facto, I had Detweeted.

Which brings up many questions for which I have no answers. If someone Retweets my Retweet, does my Detweet delete that as well? Does a Detweet detract from the original tweeter in any way? Or is it ecologically sound – sort of cleaning up social media the way one prunes boxwood or tosses out week-old tomatoes?